Suicide reflects Mideast youths’ despair

SOUK AL-JUMMA, Tunisia — On the day he chose to die, Adel Khedri woke up at 6:30 a.m., took his black backpack and headed down to the busy boulevard where he worked as a cigarette peddler.

It was the last in a series of odd jobs that had defined his hand-tomouth existence for almost nine years.

So on March 12, Adel left the dirty room he shared with his older brother in a Tunis slum for the tree-lined Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the stage for the first of the Arab Spring uprisings.

He stopped in front of the art deco Municipal Theater. He poured gasoline over his body. Then he set himself on fire.

Adel died 19 hours later. One of his last words to a doctor was “faddit” — slang for “fed up.”

Adel is one of 178 people in Tunisia who have set themselves on fire since the self-immolation two years ago of another high school dropoutturned-street vendor launched the Arab Spring.

These two book-ends of a revolution that toppled four Arab dictators show how little has changed for millions of jobless, hopeless 20-somethings across the Middle East and North Africa. The difficulty of finding a job, which helped spark the unrest, is now a prescription for continued turmoil.

Youth unemployment worldwide is up to about 12.3 percent, in part because of the global financial crisis that began five years ago. But some areas of the Middle East and North Africa suffer from more than twice that rate because of labor market problems and the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

And the future looks even worse. In the Middle East, youth unemployment is expected to rise from 27.7 percent in 2011 to 30 percent in 2018, the International Labor Organization reported this week. In North Africa, a slight increase is expected, from 23.3 percent to 23.9 percent.

Economists say fixing the problem will require broad and deep changes, such as overhauling education.

Adel and his four brothers were part of the “youth bulge” rippling across the Middle East and North Africa, a region of about 380 million people. In Arab countries such as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, those under 25 make up anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of the population, largely because of improved health care over the decades.

But the economies have not kept pace.

Even a university education may make no difference.

In Tunisia, about 230,000 university graduates are unemployed, making up one-third of the jobless, according to the National Institute of Statistics.